“It sounds like you’re ready to move on from all of that.”
“All of what?” My eyes narrow and I slide my elbows forward. I cannot have enough analysis. George could not possibly talk to me enough about myself.
“The magazine and the people and the drama—it’s too much. It would be too much for anyone. Let people sort out their own problems. Move on.”
On to what? “But it seems so unfinished. There’s no closure.”
“Did you just say closure?”
“Shut up.”
“Sorry. But seriously, Sara, I think you’re just making excuses and that’s holding you back.”
From what? “From what?”
“From doing the things you really want to do.”
“All I want to do is read magazines.”
“Then read magazines.”
“And find a bed.”
“I may be able to help you with that.”
I think that George wants to fuck me and I’m flattered and he’s cute and I like the banter thing we have going but I seriously need a bed. Maybe he means that we should go back to his place. Or maybe he means he has a beat-up futon couch in the back office that folds down into a bed that he’s going to let me borrow until I find something more suitable. This, unfortunately, is exactly what he means. There’s no innuendo, no hidden meanings, there’s no flirting when you’re carrying a futon down the street at 3:00 a.m. on a Friday night. At least the booze and tranquilizers are wearing off and I can speak without slurring, but the gallons of coffee are kicking in and I’m jittery. This must be what people mean when they say you just can’t win.
We drop the futon behind the counter on the main floor. “You don’t want freaks staring in here at you—or maybe you do.”
I have no window coverings. I put that on my mental to-buy list, along with a bed and plates and a sofa and everything else. I feel a pang in my stomach. I’m going to miss my peacock-feather-print wing chair.
I have nothing to offer George because I don’t have a kitchen or a fridge, which I quickly add to the list in my head.
“So this is where you’re going to read your magazines?”
“Yup.”
“It’s a great space. I have a guy if you need one.”
“A guy?” George is gay? He has a guy? He wants to share or lend him out? The guy must be bi. George must think I’m desperate. None of this is good.
“A designer. He did my place and we’re talking about giving the bar a makeover.”
“You have a designer?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I also have magazines.”
“What kind of magazines?”
“Magazines I think you’ll want to read.”
“Really.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what do I have to do to take a look at these so-called magazines?”
“Kiss me good-night.”
He’s serious and I do and it’s nice, soft—no tongue. He says he’ll be by tomorrow with the mysterious magazines and as I lock the door behind him I question my liflong aversion to cheesy repartee.
I am awakened by pounding on the front door. It’s light but I have no idea what time it is. I scramble to the front window and peer out. It’s George. “Sorry. I didn’t have your number.” I let him in and walk immediately to the counter, pull a Sharpie out of my purse and write my cell number on his hand. I say nothing. I am not a morning person.
“What time is it?”
“Ten.” He hands me a coffee and a bagel and a small square napkin from Connections. Good thing the Connections people didn’t know George was buying the coffee for me or one of them—that counter girl, probably—would have surely spit in it.
“I can’t believe you kept that.” George points to the Satin Rules board.
“What? It’s brilliant.”
“If you say so.” He sets his coffee down on the counter and heads for the door.
“I’m sorry,” I call after him, although I’m unsure for once about what I’m apologizing for. Maybe I smell. I haven’t had a shower even though that is one of the few things the space does have: a fully functional bathroom. “I’m not a morning person.”
George props the door open with a box. “That’s not a shocker.” He disappears for a moment then walks back through the door carrying two boxes. He goes outside and collects two more, and two more after that. Finally, he picks up the box that he’d used to prop the door open and it swings shut. “As promised.”
“The magazines?” I rush over and tear the top off the first box. “Holy shit!” I tear the top off another. “Oh my God!”
“You really love your magazines, don’t you?”
“Do you have any idea what you have here?”
“Yeah, I grew up with them. My Dad was quite the connoisseur—all those long nights at the bar, I guess.” There are hundreds of them. I’m overwhelmed. There are copies of Nifties, Spree, Sir, Carnival, Knight, Dude—I love Dude the most. Men’s nudie pin-up magazines from the fifties and sixties fill the boxes. “There’s some classier stuff in there somewhere, too, like Esquire. And a few copies of GQ from the eighties—I think those were mine.”
I want to hug him, kiss him, I’ll drop to my knees and give him a blow job if that’s what he wants as a thank-you. “George, this is incredible. Thank you. I’ll go through them and get them back to you as soon as possible.”
“Forget it. They’re yours. Keep ’em.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. They’ve been sitting in boxes taking up space in the bar for years. Consider it a housewarming gift.”
“You’re sure you don’t need them.”
George laughs. “No, I don’t need them. The Internet serves my needs just fine.”
“Ooh, porn talk. And so early in the morning.”
“I always say, it’s never too early for porn talk.”
I want to kiss him but I want to brush my teeth first. He steps closer. There will be no minty freshness. He kisses me. “Thank you,” I say. We pull apart and I realize that he probably thinks I just thanked him for kissing me, which would be pathetic and make me seem sadder than I already am. “No, not for that.” I correct myself. “I mean thank you for giving me your dad’s spank mag collection.” I clasp my hand over my mouth. I’m an idiot, an asshole, a retard. I’m not cut out for romance and cheesy repartee. But George just laughs and peels my hand from my mouth so he can kiss me again.
Open
George’s guy is Australian and calls himself Timotei. I assume it’s a nickname and that he wasn’t named after shampoo but I don’t ask because I know that anything is entirely possible. “You can call me Tim,” he says and I am relieved.
Tim takes me shopping and brings me photos. He finds a guy—no, the guy, according to Tim—to build custom shelves for my growing vintage magazine collection.
George comes by in the mornings on his way to work and brings me a coffee and a bagel from Connections. I stop by the bar around seven and we eat together. Some nights I have a nap on my new, very proper bed so I’m rested if George comes by after the bar closes for a drink and a kiss. I haven’t fucked him and he always goes home after a quick visit. But it’s nice and I think it’s normal and I have no other friends except Esther and Ellen so I’ll take what I can get.
The new, custom-built shelves are spectacular. I run my hand along the grain of the dark stained wood and sigh. It’s almost erotic, which would make me a freak, and I make a mental note to look that up online. There’s a name for every fetish.
Esther comes by to help me unpack the magazines and put them on the shelves. Watching her bend and lift the heavy stacks makes me nervous, but she wants to help and I don’t see how I can’t let her. Tim shrieks when he sees what I’m holding.
“What?”
“My lord, Sara. Is that an original copy of Flair magazine in your hands?”
“Uh-huh.”
Tim scampers over and takes it gingerly from me. “Do you know how
many people would die—absolutely die—to put their hands on this?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My friend Martin—he would kill.”
“Bring him by. He can take a look if he wants.”
“Oh, he’ll want.”
“That Tim’s a funny little guy,” Esther says after he’s gone and I’m cooking my first meal in my new kitchen.
“That he is. Can you pass me the Velveeta?” I’m making Lila’s casserole.
“He was awfully excited about those magazines.”
“There are lots of us out there.” I want to tell her about George but stop myself out of respect for superstition, or because she was friends with his dad, or maybe because I like him. I don’t know.
“You know, I could ask around. I have a feeling there are boxes of these things collecting dust in my friends’ closets and basements. They’d probably be glad to be rid of them.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. People keep the strangest things for the longest time. I’ll ask around.”
“And books—ask about books, too, like those trashy paperbacks Stephen wrote.”
I’m too wired to nap. I made Esther and I espressos with my new ridiculously expensive machine after dinner and made the mistake of having two. Now I’m shaky and tempted to pop an Ativan but opt for a beer. Since Esther was coming for dinner I haven’t seen George since this morning and he was in a hurry. I could go down to the bar, keep him company, but that might make me look needy and like a loser with no life, which I sometimes think I am, but I prefer to keep that information to myself.
My cell phone rings and I jump. My intuition says it’s George. It’s not. It’s Eva, wanting who knows what. I let it go to voice mail. I didn’t get back to her about being a reference and her name is still on the masthead at Snap and nowhere to be found on the Apples Are Tasty site, so I guess she didn’t get the job. Not that it matters, not that I should be reading Snap or logging on to Apples Are Tasty. But I can’t help it and I know it’s wrong and I always hide the evidence, burying Snap at the bottom of my recycling pile, clearing my Internet history after my daily visit to Apples Are Tasty, irrationally hoping that if no one knows, it didn’t happen.
I listen to Eva’s message. Her voice is chirpy, which means she must want something. And she does. She’s heard from her friend Martin that I have this library of vintage magazines at my new place and she’s working on this project and it would really, really help if she could come by and take a peek. I delete the message. Come by? Take a peek? Oh, fuck off, Eva. I pick up the phone again and enter my password. My service has a message retrieval system so you can undelete deleted messages within twenty-four hours of deleting them. It’s a feature custom-made for people like me. I undelete Eva’s message and listen to it again. What fucking project?
I distract myself with beer and unpacking. My magazines, Lila’s magazines, George’s dad’s magazines and the books—they’re all organized and shelved. All that’s left are the Snap boxes.
Some of the boxes are numbered, some say Personal or Misc.; they each have Sara scrawled across the lid and the sides. I open box number one and find the earliest issues of Snap, even the old photocopied ’zines we made before we had a name or any money. Box two holds issues from nineteen ninety-five, our first year on newsprint and as a weekly, box three is ninety-six. There are fourteen numbered boxes, every issue we ever made, all in order, a perfect archive. I choose a random box and pull an issue off the top. January 4th, 2000, the We’re Not Dead Yet issue. I flip to the DOs and DON’Ts page. I remember the DON’Ts—the guy in the tight silver jumpsuit at a New Year’s party, the girl who tried too hard to be Bettie Page—but the DOs are a jumble in my head. Everyone always remembers the DON’Ts. People, when they meet me at parties, tell me about this DON’T or that DON’T and how they laughed so, so hard.
I get another beer from the fridge and go through every issue in the box, looking at the DON’Ts. I make myself look at their unsuspecting eyes and remember that the second after the picture was taken and the release was signed they’d bound off to tell their friends how they’d been shot for Snap, thinking they were going to be a DO. There were never any promises, but no one assumes they’re a DON’T.
By the time I’m through the third box I’m drunk and my hands are black with newsprint. I glance at the clock because I have one now and it’s after two. I haven’t heard from George and he should have closed up by now; it’s a Wednesday. I’m nervous calling the bar—I haven’t before—but it rings and rings and rings, no answer, no machine. He has call display on the phone in his office and the possibility that he’s screening sinks in. I will march down there and demand to know why he wouldn’t take my call. The reality is more of a weave than a march but I make it to the bar. It’s dark and closed and I return home to more beer and my archives.
I sift through the DON’Ts of box eleven and there he is, in his dark suit and white socks. The socks make me wince, I can’t help it, but it’s George and the white socks shouldn’t matter. It was years ago. He said he never did it again. We don’t talk about the DON’T. He’s made a joke of it once or twice and I didn’t respond or laugh and he stopped. I’m dating a DON’T. But I don’t care about DOs and DON’Ts anymore, I shouldn’t, I can’t.
I put the George issue aside and continue looking through fifteen years of DON’Ts. I do the math longhand in my notebook: 3,560 DON’Ts. I am personally responsible for making 3,560 people feel like shit. Most of the girls probably cried. Then there’s the shunning and the therapy bills and the creeping thoughts that everybody knows, everybody at work, on the street, everybody in the universe knows. Three-thousand, five-hundred and sixty people hate me, they must. And George. It’s a joke, it’s a game, it’s his revenge to date me—are we even dating?—and dump me. Giving me his dad’s old magazines is part of the ploy to sucker me in, make me like him so he can hurt me, abandon me, mock me. He’s the hero of the DON’Ts. They’ll lift him up on their shoulders and carry him through the square. They’ll burn an effigy of me using matches from his bar. I understand now why he didn’t come by.
I pack a single suitcase and call a taxi at 8:00 a.m. I ask the driver to take me to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, to the single room I’ve reserved. Taking a suite at the Ritz was too grand and I’m too small. I ask the driver to drive faster and take shortcuts—karma is right on my tail.
I take a shower and climb naked into the hotel bed because I can and call Ted on his direct line. I’m still drunk. He picks up on the second ring. “Let me guess—you want your job back?” I can tell he’s joking, but he’s not funny.
“You’re funny. Look, I was wondering if I could get copies of all of the releases signed by the DON’Ts.”
“From the last issue?”
“No. All of them.”
Ted whistles. “That’s a whole lot of paper, Sara.”
“Can you do it?”
“I don’t know. Everything’s in chaos right now with you leaving and the Apples Are Tasty deal….”
“You hate Apples Are Tasty.”
“I bought Apples Are Tasty.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“So can you do it? Get me the releases? I’m staying at the Queen E. Just courier the originals if you don’t want to copy them. I’ll have them back to you by the end of the week.”
“Tomorrow is the end of the week.”
“Right. Well, Monday, then.”
“What do you need them for?”
“I just need them, okay?”
Ted sighs. “Okay. But I need something from you. I need you to let Eva take a look at those magazines we’ve heard about, and Brian, too.”
“Art director Brian?”
“Yes, art director Brian.”
“Why?”
“They just need to.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t fire Eva.”
“Don’t go there, Sara. It was a strictly business decision.”
; “And Gen’s all right with that?”
“I can’t talk to you about Genevieve.” Ted only uses her full name when he’s very serious.
“Fine. Just send me the releases.”
“And I’ll tell Eva and Brian you’ll be expecting them when?”
“Monday. We’ll do it Monday. In the afternoon.”
Next I call Tim. He doesn’t ask me why I want a threefold card designed with the third fold being detachable by perforation with a blank outline of a body—not too sexy, more like my body, a regular body—with my face resting atop it. I shouldn’t be smiling. I tell him I’ll take a Polaroid and have it sent over to him. I dictate the text of the card. The front should be simple, no script lettering, but no Helvetica, either—something classic, a meaningful font. It should say: DO accept my apology…And on the inside: You were never a DON’T. “At the very bottom of the page it should say, Now it’s your turn to make me over—that should be in parentheses. Then have my address printed on the back of the paper doll thing so people can mail it in. And I’ll need envelopes and postage for all of them—two stamps for each, one to mail it out and one to go on the back of the paper doll thing so they can mail that back. Got it? And find a printer who can do it today.”
“This really isn’t part of my job,” Tim says hesitantly. I tell him I’ll pay him a thousand dollars and now it is his job.
I go into the bathroom and take three Polaroids of my face. I pick the ugliest one, fasten myself into a bra, slide one of Lila’s rayon dresses over my head and take the photo to the concierge. I have no envelopes, no courier slips. I hand him a fifty and a crumpled Post-it with Tim’s address and he says he’ll take care of it. Then I take the elevator back to my room, turn my phone off and sleep until the boxes of releases arrive.
The cards aren’t perfect, the font doesn’t say meaningful to me, but there are 3,600 of them and they’re paid for and obviously nonrefundable. The makeover paper doll is good. My body is a bit blobby, but my body is a bit blobby and my face looks tired, my makeup is smudged.
Snapped Page 19